A while back I stumbled upon the legendary article; Battleship Mtron, the absurdly fast RAID array build with 9 Mtron SSDs on a blazingly fast Areca ARC-1231ML, sporting an amazing 800 MHz Intel IOP341.

It was the fastest thing on the planet. Period.

A year has passed since then. At M4N we have been experimenting with an SSD setup consisting of 4 Mtron 7000 SSDs on a development server. After some extensive benchmarking, it appeared that in nearly all situations the IO power of these beasts is far superior to that of the traditional hard disk. A decision was made to order a bunch of SSDs to be placed in multiple servers. 12 of those arrived today, along with 2 Arceca ARC-1680IX-12’s equipped with a whopping 4GB of cache each and the fast 1.2Ghz IOP348.

Seeing all that hardware together however made us think. What if we… assemble it all together in -1- massive storage array? 12 Mtron 7500’s on 2 Arceca 1680’s (6 per controller), combining the power of the RAID sets of both Areca’s into 1 single volume using software RAID. What will be the performance of that?

Stay tuned for our upcoming benchmark reports!

12 Mtron’s arrived at the office. Click for a larger image

Arjan

This entry was posted
on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Hardware, SSD.
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